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The X “primary selection”/middle click paste behavior this takes advantage of is one of my least favorite Linux features and I have had it disabled for years, s
by macNchz 3y ago
The X “primary selection”/middle click paste behavior this takes advantage of is one of my least favorite Linux features and I have had it disabled for years, so I didn’t even know it had been changed/removed in Wayland.
Having a single mouse button (that often has other functionality like autoscroll in Firefox) cause text highlighted in another app to paste in the focused app is super unintuitive to me, and caused a few significant annoyances unintentionally pasting secrets or private messages in the wrong place before I got rid of it.
- somat 3y agoConversely the select/single-click-paste is one of my favorite features of X11 it turns assembling text from various sources from a deliberate action to a natural movement. Objectively it is not that much of an improvement, it only removes two steps from normal copy paste. drag paste comes close but I never use it for some reason. But it is surprising how infuriating going back to command paste is(for example if I am on windows) I do agree that overloading the button is terrible. I like the scroll wheel but wish there was a separate middle button. And I loathe middle button auto scroll, I regard it as a useless, user hostile feature.
- foobarian 3y agoMeanwhile it is one of my favorite ever features that speeds up many tasks during my average workday. :-) It takes a bit of care though especially if there are prod-impacting sessions open.
- Aardwolf 3y agoI love middle click paste, in combination with ctrl+c/ctrl+v paste it's a second clipboard, which allows to do one kind of refactoring in between doing some other refactoring in code (as just one example). I didn't know wayland doesn't support that either, one more thing to add to the list of things it doesn't support like screenshots, xclip, mouse/keyboard automation, etc...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mainpassathome 3y agoit doesn’t not support it, it doesn’t set this unexpected behaviour as default
- Aardwolf 3y agoWhether it's unexpected or not depends on the user, you could as well say ctrl+v pasting in windows is unexpected if you don't know this shortcut. Middle click paste in linux is a standard feature this OS has always had
- macNchz 3y agoThe problem being that middle click does other stuff, like opening links in new browser tabs.
- arp242 3y agoWell, we can have a long discussion about what is "better" or not, but in the end it's just a preference, and also a long-standing paradigm. It's fine to dislikes it; everyone dislikes some features (e.g. personally I really dislike autoscroll). The thing is that it's not "unexpected" because it's been like this for >30 years, since the 80s. Nor is there anything wrong with it: it's just something you can like or dislike. Or to put it in another way: if I wanted my Unix system to behave like Windows or macOS then I'd be using Windows or macOS.
- snailmailman 3y agoIt annoys me so much. I’ve tried to disable but none of the methods I’ve seen have worked for me. I use middle click to autoscroll, and to open things in new tabs or to close tabs. Then I try to middle click autoscroll in discord or something (which works in windows!) and I’ll paste in information that I don’t intend to. This is the first I’m hearing about Wayland fixing this. Maybe I’ll give Wayland yet another try soon.
- a1369209993 3y ago> I've tried to disable but none of the methods I’ve seen have worked You can fix this in the latest working firefox version with `about:config > middlemouse.paste = false` (I found this by browsing through about:config, so I'm not sure if it's decumented anywhere), but I'm not sure if that still works in the enshittified versions. (It doesn't prevent selected text from being middle-pasted into other applications, but all my other disrupted-by-paste applications explicitly don't support middle-click-to-paste (in several cases because I deliberately wrote them that way), so I haven't gotten around to fixing that part yet.)
- snailmailman 3y agoYeah I’ve got it disabled in Firefox. And now that I’m looking into it more I’m seeing an option in VSCode, which is the other main place I keep pasting when trying to scroll. But this “feature” is enabled globally across XServer and is so deeply engrained that there is no global off switch. I must find workarounds for every application in order to make my middle mouse click function as I would expect. For an OS where everything else is so customizable this baffles me. I so frequently encounter problems where I proofread something (or my compiler finds it for me) and I find weird words or sentence fragments that I inserted on accident while navigating a document.
- suby 3y agoAgreed, I had a hell of a time switching to Linux in part due to the difficulty in disabling this feature everywhere. I simply hate it and do not want it. It doesn't bother me if other people like it, it doesn't even bother me if it's on by default, but why is it nearly impossible to disable? It's baffling. We're having a conversation in this thread about whether or not the feature is good, but it shouldn't matter. People who like the behavior and people who don't should be able to live side by side, without one affecting the other. The issue is that the feature should not be forced.
- yndoendo 3y agoI cannot stand any Operating System that does not utilize left-click highlight and middle click paste. This is great secondary buffer to the clipboard Ctrl+C && Ctrl+V. I HATE the middle click scrolling feature that Windows uses, it is not user-friendly and not needed in the age of the scroll-wheel. Another reason you have to pay me to use Windows.
- wartijn_ 3y agoWhat makes that feature "not user-friendly" instead of just a personal preference?
- philistine 3y agoNot OP, but I can say that it is a mode, which is its problem. You enter into the scroll mode and while not difficult per se to exit it can cause confusion. It is also pretty superfluous in the age of the touchpad and the ubiquity of the scroll wheel. Just another example of Microsoft working really hard to make Windows 11 look simpler, but not working on making it meaningfully simpler.
- lolinder 3y agoI don't know when middle-click scroll was introduced, but it definitely was before Windows 11, and at least as far back as 7. Also, "no modes" is both a question of personal preference and a sliding scale. Input-has-focus is a mode, too, but getting rid of that would be an obvious mistake.
- layer8 3y agoI don’t care about middle-click paste, but having selection auto-copy is also implemented by terminal emulators like Putty on Windows, and I wouldn’t want to miss that. What’s problematic with the Firefox behavior is that content gets copied (pasted) that wasn’t selected by the user.
- o11c 3y agoIt's absolutely no different than if the actual HTML contained invisible text though. The patch here would not help security at all. Only using control-x control-e before pasting (so that it comes into a real editor, not directly in the terminal) can help.
- layer8 3y agoIt’s different in that the content can change after you selected it. Invisible text can add to what you selected, but it can’t replace it. There’s also an argument to be made that invisible text shouldn’t be copied, though that’s harder to define precisely (you don’t want to copy “display: none”, but you want to copy scrolled-out content).
- mmis1000 3y agoI don't think selection along is enough to copy in windows terminal or putty. You also need to right click once to trigger the copy. So the moment that triggers actual copy always requires human interaction.
- layer8 3y agoNo, it works immediately upon selection in Putty: https://documentation.help/PuTTY/using-selection.html https://documentation.help/PuTTY/using-selection.html Also in Mintty: https://mintty.github.io/mintty.1.html#%03Text%20selection,%20copy%20&%20paste https://mintty.github.io/mintty.1.html#%03Text%20selection,%...
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIt's not a Linux feature. It's an X11 feature that is super intuitive if you've been using it for 30 years. Wayland tried to remove it but it has been begrudgingly allowed because of it's incredible usefulness since it cuts out all keyboard interaction.
- MadnessASAP 3y agoMeanwhile I'm sitting here trying to cut out all my mouse interaction. I'm annoyed when I have to move my hand back to the mouse. Of course that means I also don't have a horse in the "What should middle click do race".
- ldarby 3y ago> I'm annoyed when I have to move my hand back to the mouse. You can bind a keyboard shortcut to a script that copies the primary to clipboard, then can use ctrl-v. Most apps also bind shift-insert to paste the paste buffer, so I bind shift-delete to this script, then to paste the primary it's just shift-delete then shift-insert. Here's the "script": xsel -p | xsel -i -b
- Asooka 3y agoThis is in fact my most favourite feature. Having a selection and a clipboard just feels like second nature to me and lets me copy selected text around without having to destroy the clipboard contents.
- frrlpp 3y agoffs middle click paste is the only reason to use the mouse
- silon42 3y agoThis sounds like a one of the few good reasons to switch to Wayland, if this can really be disabled.
- duckmysick 3y agoI want to share a related annoyance. I installed Linux on an old laptop. When I want to scroll using a touchpad with two finger swipe, sometimes it triggers a two finger tap, which is a middle click - which then pastes the clipboard content. Mildly frustrating when editing code or browsing chat apps. Tried a few solutions but they didn't work on Wayland (as most of them were xinput hacks). I didn't experience such accidental pastes when I had Windows installed.
- blauditore 3y agoHa, I love it, but never figured out how to do by keyboard, even though I believe to sometimes have done it by accident. In places where this doesn't work, clipboard history is an okay replacement (if you need multiple things "transported").
- redwall_hp 3y agoYeah, I absolutely hate it. MacOS is the only system with sane handling of copying and pasting, because it doesn't have that obnoxious thing and it doesn't overload the ctrl key. Command+C doesn't interfere with ctrl+C in terminals. Copying should always be deliberate, not something that blasts out your clipboard when you click in the wrong place and select something unintentionally. And middle click is for opening tabs.
- lolinder 3y ago> not something that blasts out your clipboard when you click in the wrong place and select something unintentionally This isn't helped by the fact that the mainstream desktop OSes don't have proper clipboard managers bundled by default. Accidentally copying something isn't as big a deal when you have the most recent 200 items you've copied in an easily searchable widget.
- charcircuit 3y agoWindows has clipboard history
- lolinder 3y agoOh, I missed that! I've been mostly on Linux since before Windows 10.
- charcircuit 3y agoFYI Window's clipbord history has better security than what desktop Linux has. For example desktop Linux currently has no way to copy an image and specify that the contents are sensitive and should not be added to the history. Poor API design and the inability for APIs like the clipboard to evolve are part of the reason why desktop Linux's security keeps falling behind other operating systems.
- arp242 3y ago
- chungy 3y agoConversely, the selection buffer and middle click paste are features I consider so essential to my workflow that I cannot stand any system that lacks them.
- kstenerud 3y agoA colleague of mine once destroyed a customer's system with a middle mouse button fat finger. He was copying a listing all of the executables in various locations on the machine he'd created using ls -l, into a text document (logged in as root). Unfortunately, he accidentally middle-clicked while moving the mouse to the text editor, and it pasted everything into the shell. Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Since it was mostly symlinks in the standard /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin etc, the shell dutifully redirected garbage into each destination binary, rendering the OS unusable. One must be root to be able to do that.
- livrem 3y agoOne of the terminal emulators I use, possibly the one that comes with lxqt that Lubuntu installs by default, pops up an "are you sure?" window showing exactly what I am about to paste whenever I middle-click-paste anything with a new-line. It can be disabled, but I found I quite like that extra check and would not mind if other applications did that.
- pmontra 3y agoIt's the single greatest feature of any Unix desktop. Click and drag to select a section, or double click to select a word, or triple click to select a line, then middle click to paste. All without leaving the mouse or the touchpad. I buy laptops with physical mouse keys by the touchpad to middle click easily.
- Zuiii 3y agoAny gesture-like feature is unintuitive if you don't take the time familiarize yourself with it. It's one of my absolute best UX improvement features in linux, I just wish it was available on other operating systems.